When Touché gathered this year for a company-wide smeeting at Cinema Ex-Centris in Montreal, the theme — “Transformation is a way of life” — was apropos. For the Omnicom agency, with offices in Montreal and Toronto, it’s been a whirlwind year defined by change: new clients, new staff, new structure and new offices. However, one thing remains the same. Touché continues to generate breakthrough ideas that deliver.
At the MIAs, Touché was the most-awarded agency. Its Montreal office led with 11 medals, while Touché Toronto landed six (including a gold for Canadian Tire’s “Shovel It Foward” work, pictured above). In addition to its MIAs success, it was the most awarded agency (for the eighth year) at the Prix Média Infopresse. Globally, Touché won a gold and a bronze at the Internationalist in New York, a gold and silver at the prestigious Festival of Media in Rome and was the only Canadian media agency shortlisted at the Mashies in NYC this fall.
These accolades come on the back of a major internal reorganization, designed to put data and business intelligence at the core of every decision. The agency (which was named Marketing‘s Agency of the Year in 2014) completely revamped its teams and resources to highlight three units — strategy, buying and business intelligence — redesigned to work cohesively and deliver strategy based on meaningful consumer insights.
Touché efforts to drive clients’ business are illustrated by a pilot program, whereby one of its programmatic experts is embedded at Sport Chek’s head office in Calgary, working intimately with the merchandising and inventory teams to develop predictive inventory management solutions driven by Touché’s data and analytics backbone.
The agency has a strong relationship with the retailer and its corporate parent, Canadian Tire Corp. In a groundbreaking digital partnership with The Weather Network, the corporation’s brands can augment programmatic buys with weather-sensitive data to make seasonal buys even more relevant. Another Touché-brokered deal forged a significant multi-year, multi-million dollar multimedia partnership with TSN placed a live broadcast studio in Sport Chek’s new store at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Square, overlooking the Air Canada Centre.
Such innovation helped Touché win 13 major media accounts as varied as Absolut Elyx USA, Cogeco, Desjardins, Kohler, Quebec’s health ministry, SiriusXM, Travel Alberta, and World Vision. Plus, Touché bucked industry trends and didn’t lose a single client.
In turn, staff increased to 135, up from 91 a year ago. Much of the growth happened in the Toronto office, which opened in 2013 with 15 people and now has 44, necessitating new Queen’s Quay offices.
Accounts and headcounts weren’t the only thing on the rise: revenues are up year-over-ear since 2012 (28% this year) and that’s expected to continue, fuelled by the burgeoning Toronto office, which this year landed the agency’s first U.S. clients.
